Top 20 election-related YouTube videos (according to Twitter)

Update: this analysis covers a few less days than I originally stated – the results should look quite different once we add in this week’s links (and next week’s!).

Here are the top 20 Australian election-related YouTube videos so far up to last Friday morning, according to the Twitterati. Or to be more precise, here are the 20 videos which have been linked to the most in tweets containing the #ausvotes hashtag posted between 17 July and 6 August, according to the Twapperkeeper archive.

Couple of interesting things to note:

• the mismatches between the Twitter link rankings of some of these videos with the number of views they have received on YouTube;
• the low numbers of links generally (could be a glitch with the scripts, but I’m reasonably confident it isn’t)
• the reasonably solid performance of ‘made-for-web’ comedy videos performed and/or produced by professionals
• the high retweet value of ‘official’ campaign videos (in which I’d probably count GetUp!) – although it’s important to note that the tweets that go alongside the videos are frequently less-than flattering…
• and if I may add a personal note, the only mild sharpness or funniness of even the sharpest and funniest of these videos…

	Video Title	Twitter links	YouTube views (as at 12/08/10)	Notes
1	Tony Abott's archaic views	64	45477	GetUp! Ad
2	LEAVE JULIA ALONE!	59	37631	Spoof on Chris Crocker's "Leave Britney Alone!" video
3	Tony Abbott: the man your PM should be	56	88054	Old Spice animated parody by Small Poppy
4	Bob Katter Your Force From Fhe North	35	21883	Bob Katter's campaign video
5	Labor Lemons	33	46260	Liberal party campaign advertisement
6	Julia Gillard slams Downer over security	29	1422	Clip from ABC news showing Gillard "in full flight" during a press conference
7	Sex Party v Family First Debate Sunrise	27	37999	Clip from Channel 7's breakfast show 'Sunrise'
8	Clarke and Dawe - A Real Voter	23	1396	Clarke and Dawe skit from the ABC TV's The 7.30 Report 05/08/2010
9	Julia RE: Leaks, the (un)real Julia and sticking the boot in	23	275	Gabby Millgate spoof of Julia Gillard
10	It's the same labor	19	22431	Liberal party campaign advertisement
11	Make Your Vote Count	19	4920	Family First campaign advertisement
12	Tony Abbott's Debt Without Stimulus	18	1678	Apparently user-created video arguing that Australia's debt is lower than it would be today if the Coalition were in government.
13	Clarke and Dawe - the story so far	18	2574	Clarke and Dawe skit from the ABC TV's The 7.30 Report 29/07/2010
14	Video has been removed by the user	17	n/a	n/a
15	Fair Go for Billionaires - Not Against Reform	17	8315	Campaign ad spoof by Manic Studios (Charles Firth)
16	Wilson Tuckey Liberal for O'Connor	16	1145	Official campaign ad for Wilson Tuckey
17	Tony Abbott Character Slam by Paul Keating	15	11317	Paul Keating performs a four minute ad libitum character slam on Tony Abbot on ABC Radio in March 2010.
18	Labor's Deal With The Greens: A Carbon Tax Is Coming	12	11980	Liberal party campaign advertisement
19	Keith Olbermann Special Comment On Shirley Sherrod Controversy (Part 1)	12	19473	Not sure what's going on here. The video pertains to the Shirley Sherrod controversy, but the tweets are to do with the Australian Greens and the Christian right...
20	GRUEN NATION | Ep. 2 | The pitch: SoDUS	12	2903	The Pitch: SoDUS's fear ad targeting The Liberal party - from

By the way, I made this table by importing a .csv into the very nifty WP-Table Reloaded plugin

A fairly big caveat: I don’t think this list tells us anything much about the role of YouTube in the election (if it even has one); or how Australian citizens are using YouTube as a platform to engage in either the media game around the election or the substantive issues. For that, I’ll need a different approach entirely – more on that later, I hope.

Even given all that, as someone with a fair bit of interest in YouTube, the list strikes me as less than electrifying. Where are the shocking, witty, cute or downright game-changing videos that the Twitterati has missed? If you know of some, let me know in comments here or on Twitter. Or is there just something deadeningly uninspiring (to critique or comedy alike) about this whole election?

How I did this: in short, with a lot of help from some very clever scripts, for which I mostly have Axel to thank. First we extract then resolve all the links (bit.ly and the like) to their ‘original’ versions; and then we have to normalise all the youtube links (which can appear in all sorts of formats).

Here’s the script to extract and normalise the YouTube links:

 

# youtubeextract.awk - extract YouTube links from Twapperkeeper export data
#
# extracts YouTube links from the first column of the CSV file, and standardises link format
#
# output format:
# youtubeurl, [original columns]
#
# for tweets containing multiple links, the script adds new rows for each link
#
# Released under Creative Commons (BY, NC, SA) by Jean Burgess and Axel Bruns - je.burgess@qut.edu.au / a.bruns@qut.edu.au

BEGIN {
getline header
print "youtubeurl," header
IGNORECASE = 1
}

$1 ~ /http:\/\/(www.)*youtu([A-Za-z0-9[:punct:]]+)/ {

a=0
do {
match(substr($1, a),/http:\/\/(www.)*youtu([A-Za-z0-9[:punct:]]+)?/,atArray)
a=a+atArray[0, "start"]+atArray[0, "length"]

if (atArray[0] != 0) {
youtube = ""
start = match(atArray[0],/v(=|\/)(.+?)&*/)			# case v=___________ or v/___________
if(start != 0) {
youtube = substr(atArray[0], start + 2, 11)
} else {
start = match(atArray[0],/#p.+\//)				# case #p/_/_/___________
if(start != 0) {
youtube = substr(atArray[0], start + 2)
sub(/.*\//, "", youtube)
youtube = (substr(youtube, 1, 11))
} else {							# case http://youtu.be/___________
start = match(atArray[0],"http://youtu.be/")
if(start != 0) {
youtube = substr(atArray[0], start + 16, 11)
}
}
}

if(youtube != "") { youtube = "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=" youtube }

print youtube "," $0

}

} while(atArray[0, "start"] != 0)

}

From there, I just counted them and looked ’em up. 🙂